On November 19, 1943, the submarine USS Sculpin was sunk by the Japanese Navy. Dozens of crewmembers survived—an extremely rare event—and were interred aboard a Japanese aircraft carrier, when it too was sunk in turn by Sculpin's sister ship Sailfish. At the end of World War II, several unlikely survivors would tell a tale of endurance against these amazing reversals of fortune, told in this history. Here too is the story of Sculpin's Lt. Commander John Phillip Cromwell, whose struggle was not in surviving, but in sealing his own fate to prevent American code-breaking secrets to fall into Japanese hands—an act of heroism that earned him a posthumous Medal of Honor.